The Weight of a Moment

by Michael Bowe

It was my own personal theory that most lifetimes could be summed up by ten to twenty moments, meaningful snippets ranging from a handful of seconds to a few spins around the clock face that contained both the best and worst of one’s character and experiences.

I knew that the best stories were the ones that stung a little bit in the telling; the ones that most people didn’t volunteer to friends or family; the ones they kept locked deep within themselves.

The newspaper business was similar to real estate in as much as it was all about location. The chance of an article getting read had a lot to do with its placement in the paper, the black and white real estate it occupied. The front page of any section was basically the newspaper equivalent of ocean front property, and the front page of the paper itself was a beautiful beachfront home on a perfect white sand beach. It was far and away the most desirable place for an article to land as it was ensured a large number of readers.

“One day,” Tracy said, “my daughter asked me why Daddy gets so grumpy. She was only six years old and far too young for me to discuss the hardships of war so I kept it simple. I told her that when people we love confuse us the best thing we can do is hug them, simply give them a long, tight hug. A couple of days later, Mark was having a bad day and he snapped at Gail, and she walked right over and hugged him. At the time, I was standing beside the sink drying the dinner dishes and I could not stop my tears as they streamed down my face. I know my Mark, I thought, and he won’t let that little girl down.”

“Anyone who has ever stared at a blank sheet of paper for an extended period of time understands the writing sentiment, ‘I hate to write, but I love having written,’ because writing is hard.

Words are the foundation of our humanity. We exist in our words. We are the words that we choose. Words matter. It’s as simple as that.

AJ hoped his brainchild would receive. He’d knocked around the art world long enough to know that there was no such thing as bad publicity; art sells best when cutting edge and controversial. “It’s not art unless it’s loved or hated,” AJ once told an interviewer early in his career. “Art moves people to the extreme reaches of their emotions.”

“Completed in 1889, the Eiffel Tower was constructed as an attraction for an international exposition. The invention of Gustave Eiffel, a French engineer who specialized in steel construction, the tower was the tallest structure on earth until 1929 when the Chrysler Building in New York surpassed it. It is still the tallest structure in Paris. At nine hundred eighty-four feet, its conspicuous height almost resulted in its dismantling after the exposition, as it has not always been popular with Parisians. Many petitioned for its removal, calling the tower a monstrosity and blight on the city’s skyline. Even though it weighs over seven thousand tons, the tower is considered a brilliant feat of engineering because the pressure on the earth beneath it is less than three hundred pounds.”

The irony of our connected world was that the same technologies that connected and empowered us could also be used to isolate and belittle us.

Resembling slow motion, Calvin picked up his shotgun, walked to the door of his pickup truck, climbed behind the wheel, and turned the key to start the engine. It cranked a bit and finally turned over, and Calvin drove sluggishly away, so slowly that barely any dust rose in its tracks. The old truck glided across the driveway like a memory across a mind. Still standing in the doorframe, Tom realized that he didn’t even know what Calvin Purdy looked like; on this moonless night, he never saw the face of his late-night visitor. In many ways, Calvin was just a disquieted ghost from the past.

The monochrome days of winter

As a writer, I knew that struggle well, and I knew that no words were always better than the wrong words.

Much more was lost in that garage at the end of that rope than the quiet life of a heartbroken insurance salesman—the town lost its cherished moment and its innocence.

true accomplishment comes from bettering yourself, not defeating another.

“Digby is a phenomenon. That’s what’s happening.” “Why?” Tom asked with a befuddled look on his face. “These kinds of things are always hard to understand, Tom, but I’ve seen it many times before—the public latches onto something innocuous and suddenly it’s relevant. There is a circular logic that develops: It’s relevant because so many people are interested in it, and so many people are interested in it because it’s relevant. It’s some kind of group dynamic where the group interest creates relevance that didn’t previously exists, relevance with no basis in reality. There isn’t a logical explanation—it just happens.

if we are graceful people and extend kindness and compassion to one another during those moments, we have the ability to impact one another’s moments, to impact one another’s lives.